Having a strong online presence is more important than ever. Brands need to invest in standing out on the crowded digital shelf with content tailored to the customer’s needs. Beyond the product page, Amazon Stores offer brands the ability to create a custom storefront that highlights certain products and tells your brand story. Just like a brick-and-mortar planogram, brands can create a unique look and feel for their online storefront down to the color and product arrangement.
What is an Amazon Store?
Released in 2018, Amazon Stores are free and digital storefronts available to vendors who are already using Amazon Advertising (previously known as Amazon Marketing Services).
Previously, Amazon Pages offered one template that typically took the form of a single landing page with a display of product offerings.
Now with Amazon Stores, brands can choose from the following three preset templates: the Product Grid, the Marquee, and the Showcase. Since each brings different benefits to the Store, brands need to choose a template that fits with their brand story and marketing goals.
The Product Grid option offers a direct product display for your selection of products, along with the ability to create categories for product offerings. This is optimal for brands who want to keep a straightforward focus on their products and product lines.
The Marquee is a second template offering. It has room on the landing page for only a few carefully curated products and space for lifestyle imagery. With this template, brands can highlight customer quotes or reviews to emphasize products or features and to show customer engagement.
The Showcase, which is the most flexible option, offers the widest variety of layouts within the template. The Showcase is ideal for brands wanting to feature a variety of media content, such as videos or images alongside the product images or reviews.
Benefits of an Amazon Store
Clicking on the Vendor’s name above a product title directs online shoppers to the brand’s Amazon Store. Sponsored Brands can also direct shoppers to Amazon Stores through the use of Amazon Advertising.
Amazon Stores create a fresh and curated shopping experience meant to boost brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Amazon Stores provide a user experience that makes shopping easy and visually appealing, especially for shoppers who buy multiple products from the same brand.
These new Amazon landing pages also offer a huge potential for cross-selling across your product lines. Depending on the template, brands are able to group products according to category, use, or benefit. Pairing this with customer reviews or video provides a premium shopping journey that encompasses the entire brand rather than a single product.
Things to Keep in Mind
Amazon Stores are meant to strengthen brand relationships, but they need to be easily accessible to customers. The storefronts can be difficult to find since they are not currently indexed in Amazon’s search engine algorithm, and won’t come up as a result in the SERP.
Amazon recommends promoting your Amazon Store via Amazon search ads because traffic to Stores is measured from the primary traffic sources of Sponsored Brands, organic traffic, and tagged online sources for more granular tracking.
Because of the newness of Amazon Stores and their limited visibility in the search engine, the ecommerce giant is still working out the best methods to measure the success of Stores.
Right now, Amazon offers Insights that include data on page views within an Amazon Store, and brand purchases that a customer makes within 14 days of visiting the digital storefront. But until Amazon Store Insights are more deeply developed, Stores can be only a complementary element of Amazon advertising strategy alongside other ad campaigns.
Even though Amazon is still ironing out the kinks behind using an Amazon Store, the low barrier to creating a Store and the strongly branded shopping experience is hard to pass up.
Editor’s Note: On September 5, 2018, Amazon rebranded its advertising platform. Amazon Marketing Services changed to Amazon Advertising and Amazon Advertising Platform changed to Amazon DSP, among other changes. This blog post was changed on October 10, 2018 to reflect those changes.
